re interesting in his
exercises, and exhibitions as the increased multiplicity of public
religious occasions tend to pall on the appetite of hearers. Protracted
meetings from day to day, and often from week to week, are making
demands upon ministers, which no human power can sustain and, where
these are dispensed with, it is often necessary to introduce something
tantamount, in other forms, to satisfy the suggestions and wishes of
persons so influential as to render it imprudent not to attempt to
gratify them. In the soberest congregations, throughout nearly all
parts of the land, these importunate, and, without unkindness, I am
disposed to add, morbid minds are to be found, often in considerable
numbers. Almost everywhere, in order to maintain their ground and
satisfy the taste of the times, labours are demanded of ministers in
these two denominations enough to kill any man in a short period. It is
as if Satan had come into the world in the form of an angel of light,
seeming to be urging on a good work, but pushing it so hard as to
destroy the labourers by over exaction.

"The wasting energies--the enfeebled, ruined health--the frequent
premature deaths--the failing of ministers in the Presbyterian and
Congregational connexions from these causes all over the country, almost
as soon as they have begun to work--all which is too manifest not to be
seen, which everybody feels that takes any interest in this subject, are
principally, and with few exceptions, owing to the unnecessary
exorbitant demands on their intellectual powers, their moral and
physical energies. And the worst of it is, we not only have no
indemnification for this amazing, immense sacrifice, by a real
improvement of the state of religion, but the public mind is vitiated:
an unnatural appetite for spurious excitements, all tending to
fanaticism, and not a little of it the essence of fanaticism, is created
and nourished. The interests of religion in the land are actually
thrown backward. It is a fever, a disease which nothing but time,
pains, and a change of system can cure. A great body of the most
talented, best educated, most zealous, most pious, and purest Christian
ministers in the country--not to disparage any others--a body which in
all respects will bear an advantageous comparison with any of their
class in the world, is threatened to be enervated, to become sickly, to
have their minds wasted, and their lives sacrificed out of season, and
w